Christopher Priest - The Discharge

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The Discharge

by Christopher Priest

Comme tous les songe-creux, je confondis le désenchantement avec la vérité.

Jean-Paul Sartre

I emerge into my memories of life at the age of twenty. I was a soldier, recently released from boot

camp, being marched by an escouade of black-cap military policemen to the naval compound in Jethra

harbor. The war was approaching the end of its three thousandth year and I was serving in a conscript

army.

I marched mechanically, staring at the back of the man's head in front of me. The sky was dark grey with

cloud and a stiff cold wind streamed in from the sea. My awareness of life leapt into being around me. I

knew my name, I knew where we had been ordered to march, I knew or could guess where we would

be going after that. I could function as a soldier. This was my moment of birth into consciousness.

Marching uses no mental energy—the mind is free to wander, if you have a mind. I record these words

some years later, looking back, trying to make sense of what happened. At the time, the moment of

awareness, I could only react, stay in step.

Of my childhood, the years leading up to this moment of mental birth, little remains. I can piece together

the fragments of a likely story: I was probably born in Jethra, university town and capital city on the

southern coast of our country. Of my parents, brothers or sisters, my education, any history of childhood

illnesses, friends, experiences, travels, I remember nothing. I grew to the age of twenty; only that is

certain.

And one other thing, useless to a soldier. I knew I was an artist.

How could I be sure of that, trudging along with the other men, in a phalanx of dark uniforms, kitbags,

clanking mess-tins, steel helmets, boots, stamping down a puddled road with a chill wind in our faces?

I knew that in the area of blankness behind me was a love of paintings, of beauty, of shape and form and

color. How had I gained this passion? What had I done with it? Aesthetics were my obsession and

fervor. What was I doing in the army? Somehow this totally unsuitable candidate must have passed

medical and psychological tests. I had been drafted, sent to boot camp; somehow a drill sergeant had

trained me to become a soldier.

Here I was, marching to war.

· · · · ·

We boarded a troopship for passage to the southern continent, the world's largest unclaimed territory. It

was there that the fighting was taking place. All battles had been fought in the south for nearly three

thousand years. It was a vast, uncharted land of tundra and permafrost, buried in ice at the pole. Apart

from a few outposts along the coast, it was uninhabited except by battalions.

I was assigned to a mess-deck below the waterline, already hot and stinking when we boarded, soon

crowded and noisy as well.

I withdrew into myself, while sensations of life coursed maddeningly through me. Who was I? How had I

come to this place? Why could I not remember what I had been doing even the previous day?

But I was able to function, equipped with knowledge of the world, with working ability to use my

equipment, I knew the other men in my escadron and I understood some of the aims and history of the

war. It was only myself I could not remember. For the first day, as we waited in our deck for other

detachments to board the ship, I listened in to the talk of the other men, hoping mainly for insights about

myself, but when none of those was revealed I settled instead for finding out what concerned them. Their

concerns would be mine.

Like all soldiers they were complaining, but in their case the complaints were tinged with real

apprehension. It was the prospect of the three thousandth anniversary of the outbreak of war that was

the problem. They were all convinced that they were going to be caught up in some major new offensive,

an assault intended to resolve the dispute one way or another. Some of them thought that because there

were still more than three years to go until the anniversary the war would be ended before then. Others

pointed out cynically that our four-year term of conscription was due to end a few weeks after the

millennium. If a big offensive was in progress we would never be allowed out until it was over.

Like them, I was too young for fatalism. The seed of wanting to escape from the army, to find some way

to discharge myself, had been sown.

I barely slept that night, wondering about my past, worrying about my future.

· · · · ·

When the ship started its voyage it headed south, passing the islands closest to the mainland. Off the

coast of Jethra itself was Seevl, a long grey island of steep cliffs and bare windswept hills that blocked

the view of the sea from most parts of the city. Beyond Seevl a wide strait led to a group of islands

known as the Serques—these were greener, lower, with many attractive small towns nestling in coves

and bays around their coastlines.

Our ship passed them all, weaving a way between the clustering islands. I watched from the rail,

enchanted by the view.

As the long shipboard days passed slowly I found myself drawn again and again to the upper deck,

where I would find a place to stand and stare, usually alone. So close to home but beyond the blocking

mass of Seevl, the islands slipped past, out of reach, this endless islandscape of vivid colors and glimpses

of other places, distant and shrouded in haze. The ship ploughed on steadily through the calm water, the

massed soldiery crammed noisily within, few of the men so much as even glancing away to see where we

were.

The days went by and the weather grew noticeably warmer. The beaches I could see now were white

and fringed with tall trees, tiny houses visible in the shade beyond. The reefs that protected many of the

islands were brilliantly multicolored, jagged and encrusted with shells, breaking the sea-swell into spumes

of white spray. We passed ingenious harbors and large coastal towns clinging to spectacular hillsides,

saw pluming volcanoes and rambling, rock-strewn mountain pastures, skirted islands large and small,

lagoons and bays and river estuaries.

It was common knowledge that it was the people of the Dream Archipelago who had caused the war,

though as you passed through the Midway Sea the peaceful, even dreamy aspect of the islands

undermined this certainty. The calm was only an impression, an illusion borne of the distance between

ship and shore. To keep us alert on our long southerly voyage the army mounted many compulsory

shipboard lectures. Some of these recounted the history of the struggle to achieve armed neutrality in

which the islands had been engaged for most of the three millennia of the war.

Now they were by consent of all parties neutral, but their geographical location—the Midway Sea

girdled the world, separating the warring countries of the northern continent from their chosen battlefields

in the uninhabited southern polar land—ensured that military presence in the islands was perpetual.

I cared little for any of that. Whenever I was able to get away to the upper deck I would stare in rapt

silence at the passing diorama of islands. I tracked the course of the ship with the help of a torn and

probably out-dated map I had found in a ship's locker and the names of the islands chimed in my

consciousness like a peal of bells: Paneron, Salay, Temmil, Mesterline, Prachous, Muriseay, Demmer,

Piqay, the Aubracs, the Torquils, the Serques, the Reever Fast Shoals, and the Coast of Helvard's

Passion.

Each of these names was evocative to me. Reading the names off the map, identifying the exotic

coastlines from fragments of clues—a sudden rise of sheer cliffs, a distinctive headland, a particular

bay—made me think that everywhere in the Dream Archipelago was already embedded in my

consciousness, that somehow I derived from the islands, belonged in them, had dreamed of them all my

life. In short, while I stared at the islands from the ship I felt my artistic sensibilities reviving. I was startled

by the emotional impact on me of the names, so delicate and suggestive of unspecified sensual pleasures,

out of key with the rest of the coarse and manly existence on the ship. As I stared out across the narrow

stretches of water that lay between our passing ship and the beaches and reefs I would quietly recite the

names to myself, as if trying to summon a spirit that would lift me up, raise me above the sea and carry

me to those tide-swept strands.

Some of the islands were so large that the ship sailed along parallel with their coastlines for most of the

day, while others were so small they were barely more than half-submerged reefs which threatened to rip

at the hull of our elderly ship.

Small or large, all the islands had names. As we passed one I could identify on my map I circled the

name, then later added it to an ever-growing list in my notebook. I wanted to record them, count them,

note them down as an itinerary so that one day I might go back and explore them all. The view from the

sea tempted me.

There was only one island stop for our ship during that long southward voyage.

My first awareness of the break in our journey was when I noticed that the ship was heading towards a

large industrialized port, the installations closest to the sea seemingly bleached white by the cement dust

spilling from an immense smoking factory that overlooked the bay. Beyond this industrial area was a long

tract of undeveloped shoreline, the tangle of rainforest briefly blocking any further sight of civilization.

Then, after rounding a hilly promontory and passing a high jetty wall, a large town built on a range of low

hills came suddenly into sight, stretching away in all directions, my view of it distorted by the shimmering

heat that spread out from the land across the busy waters of the harbor. We were of course forbidden

from knowing the identity of our stop, but I had my map and I already knew the name.

The island was Muriseay, the largest of the islands in the Archipelago and one of the most important.

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